Computer networks are pervasive in our society and virtually all human activity is now influenced at least to some extent by existence and usage of these networks. Therefore, the more reliable these networks are, the better for all concerned. Accordingly, substantial effort is being invested in improving reliability and long-term operability of these networks. One current approach to improving computer network reliability is to continuously monitor events or operating states of peripheral devices on an individual basis in the network to determine if those states reflect normal or failing peripheral-device operation. Each peripheral device or group thereof has its own individually dedicated server for performing at least that monitoring function. If such monitoring allows for sufficiently early notification of an event such as a failing device or portion thereof, (e.g., in a disk drive peripheral, failure-events such as cooling-fan failure, bad fuse, ac power failure, invalid data sector read, checksum error, inconsistent time stamps, incoherent stripe, etc. can occur), then action can be undertaken in an attempt to avoid or mitigate effects of the particular failure mechanism(s) involved. Accordingly, overall system or network reliability is generally enhanced by such timely event-notification and response thereto. But, setting-up the notification system on an individual basis, and monitoring and reporting events on an individual basis is problematic as discussed further below.
Typically, in the aforementioned prior art, operating states of hardware peripheral devices, such as, for example, disk drives, are monitored and software is utilized as the avenue by which such monitoring is performed. Distributed management software running in client server networks is available now for these purposes. In this prior art, as noted, a server-host computer is normally associated with, or dedicated to, a group of peripherals including disk drives and is tasked with monitoring events (such as failures) associated with those peripherals and reporting such events to its client. However, since each such group of peripherals has its own server for that purpose, each such server operates in this events notification arena independently of all other servers in the network. Thus, there is a one-to-one relationship between any disk array and the server computer monitoring it. This arrangement necessitates the programming and set-up of each such server on an individual basis to monitor a particular peripheral or group of peripherals. In other words, in the prior art, methodology for handling this peripheral device state information, or system event configuration information, involves a manual set-up on a per-host basis (one server at a time). This set-up is accomplished by editing a text-based configuration file which is very time consuming and error-prone. And this arrangement offers further complexity if changes or upgrades are required: for example, if a new computer network service person hires-on with a new pager number, it is a non-trivial challenge to travel to each separate storage system on a network of, for example, a thousand or more disk drive peripherals scattered geographically around the nation (or, even worse, around the globe) in order to properly upgrade the pager number for each peripheral device cluster. Additional challenge is presented in the events-notification arena by pre-existing network state conditions wherein portions of a client's database contain data in conflict with other data contained in portions of one or more of its servers' databases. These complexities, limitations and challenges of the prior art are addressed and overcome while further enhancing reliability of network operation, by the welcome arrival of the present invention.